The challenge in coming to terms with the art
of Nancy Grossman is an internal one. To see one of her ferocious life-size
heads, bound in black leather, zippered-up, with protruding features and
gnarled teeth, all exquisitely carved and crafted, or to see one of her
recent "black lavascapes" made of twisted leather with slices
of cut rubber and metallic parts, is to feel an inner sense of being that
goes far beyond the mundane world of external events. Grossman is engaged
in the pursuit of her own inner-directed motif, her own concept of the
human condition that pulls us back to the sobriety of another emotional
reality.

The label that is often attached to her work is
"expressionism."2
But what does this mean in the case of Grossman? Is her work merely an
expression of something unknown to the world of rational ideas? Is it trying
to communicate an inner drive, a passion, that exceeds how we basically
feel towards one another? One cannot deny these issues as possessing a
certain content that impacts our attention. There is an undeniable obsession
that resides within her work-an obsessiveness that is at the core of much
of the great art of the past, from Caravaggio to Goya to Kahlo. As Grossman
explains: "You have to be obsessed enough with what you are obsessed
with."3

Yet there is another side to her work, an obverse
tendency that is more pragmatic. Grossman's attitude toward sculpture is
directed toward the process-the process of how she works and how she thinks
in relation to her materials. It is not based on a desire to mystify the
viewer, to instill fear or insult, or to give some hopeless, disparaging
view of the future of humankind. In fact, her intentions are quite the
opposite. She is unassuming both in her work and in her desire to make
art. Grossman has never been a careerist in the trendy, market-driven sense
of the word. Whether working in collage, relief, assemblage, or mixed-media
sculpture, she has made it clear that her work is always about a process.
She herself has said, "The materiality of the end result is worth
the process." She understands the necessity of "plodding along,"
as she puts it, in order to make her materials function more physically
in their goal towards visual representation.

Despite her high regard for technique and process,
Grossman does not deny the psychological, physical, and existential realities
that may emanate from her work. In her typically provocative way, Grossman
states: "The longer you live, the more the earth gets you. You fall
under the spell of gravity." This comment is not only related to her
recent collage works, such as the "Volcano Series" (1993),
or her sculptural reliefs, such as Opus Volcanus (1994), but also
to her perception of her own physicality and the limitations she has recently
learned to accept.

At the end of 1995, a serious physical impairment
inflicted her left hand and crippled her ability to work for over a year.
Grossman discovered that the cartilage of her first metacarpal bone was
completely worn away. This traumatized her hand movements to the extent
that she virtually lost control of the reflexes she needed to perform the
detailed functions required by her work. After years of repetitive and
highly concentrated movement related to precision carving, Grossman was
forced to take a hiatus from her activity and have her hand surgically
rebuilt. After several operations, she has gradually regained movement,
but not with the same facility to which she had been accustomed. This accounts
for Grossman's inability to carve wood in recent years and her turning
instead to making works more related to collage and assemblage. Ironically,
this is where her career began in the early '60s- a time when the Neo-Dada
spirit of assemblage and Happenings occupied much of the attention of the
art world.

"B.S.T.", 1969. Carved wood, leather,
and grommets, 16 in. high

One might argue that Grossman is a kind of pictorialist
who eventually made her way into sculpture. She had studied with the German
émigré artist Richard Lindner at Pratt Institute in the late-'50s.
It was here that she grew to understand the importance of fig uration in
her art and also to come to terms with her need to develop a personal vocabulary
of forms.4
Lindner, who was considered eccentric by some of his New York artist colleagues,
impressed upon his students the importance of drawing. Through Lindner,
Grossman came to believe in her extraordinary capability as a draftswoman.
Despite the disturbing content of many of her works, both in two and three
dimensions, most critics still cannot argue with the formal quality of
her line.

One glance at a drawing such as Five Figures
(1984) makes the bold and remarkable character of the artist's ability
abundantly evident. In this large-scale work, made entirely with charcoal
and graphite, Grossman delivers a feminist-inspired allegory of betrayal
and guilt. The force of her line, the accuracy of her figurative renderings,
and the placement of the light and dark shapes within the compositional
space represent a disturbing personal confession, the content of which
is conceivably related to her upbringing as one of several children living
on a farm in a rural upstate New York community during the late-'40s.5

Grossman continued to believe in herself. She
recognized at the outset that any artist who has sustaining value must
develop a personal language of form, one that can be applied with a diversity
of syntax within a chosen field of investigation. Also, under Lindner she
came to know the importance of the line not only as a drawing instrument
but also as the foundation of formal composition. She was fortunate to
discover in Lindner an artist "dedicated to his own integrity."
This integrity became a basic component in her search for her own artistry;
it was a lesson that Grossman never forgot.

One might say that integrity has been the cornerstone
in Grossman's career as she has moved from painting to collage, between
assemblage and relief sculpture, and finally, by 1968, to the heads. Her
first important exhibition was at the Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery in
1969 and consisted mainly of the rancorous-looking carved heads wrapped
in black leather. Although the gallery was diffident about handling the
work at the beginning-perhaps because it was transported to the owner in
two large shopping bags-he eventually agreed to show it. There is little
doubt that Ekstrom had some difficulties with the straightforward content
in Grossman's work.6
Reportedly, he was visibly shaking as he looked through the drawings. Yet,
in spite of his initial hesitancy, the artist's association with the gallery
continued for 12 years and came to be one of the most productive periods
in Grossman's career.

It is curious that by far the greater portion
of the artist's subjects has been male. The heads and drawings of bound
male figures take on a mythological significance, a ritualized aspect,
as if they emerged from some dark night of the soul into the presence of
stark daylight. In a recent essay on beauty, the artist Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe
cites the German philosopher Winckelmann as proposing that the ideal male
should be represented as possessing some traces of the feminine.7
If these qualities are not present, the representation of the male lends
itself to "an aggressive display of brute physical violence"
and thus appears "ludicrous and repulsive." With some exceptions,
it is curious to note how many of Grossman's collage paintings of male
figures appear feminine in their grace and vulnerability, yet how the more
visible leather-strapped heads, such as T.Y.V.L. (1970) have just
the opposite effect.8
By appearing removed from their femininity, these severed heads assert
an inner violence and a hell- bent absurdity as they confront the world
in their aggressive masquerade.

"T.Y.V.L.", 1970. Patent leather
over wood, 15 in. high

Grossman's vision is not far from that of the
French Surrealist poet and playwright Antonin Artaud. Grossman shares with
Artaud the knowledge of an inarticulate space between the masculine and
the feminine, between the rational mind that represses desire and the desire
of the body to release itself to the forces of an unmediated experience.9
When Grossman's heads appear in the light of day, constrained by darkness
and bondage, one is compelled to reflect on the profound split between
mind and body. Who are these creatures? From what world did they emerge?
What is the nature of our civilized environment that imposes a hiatus between
the rational and irrational expressions of the human mind? Where is the
closure between them? The heads suggest a kind of schizophrenic condition,
a division between two states of being, but they rarely give us a simplistic
cause-and-effect relationship. The conflict is both greater and more subtle
than their accountability through language. They imply the lost need, at
least on a conscious level, for ritual in our society, in our brave new
(digital) world. It is as if our culture had gone too far in the direction
of the rational, to the zero degree of overdetermination and had left the
human race as a species of sublimated creatures wandering in the purgatorial
chasm between torment and lucidity.

A few months before her disability, Grossman completed
a large scale, three color etching, titled Apollo the Healer (1995).
This was a time-consuming work not only because of its scale, measuring
three by five feet, but because of the amount of crucial dexterity needed
in order to gain the effects that she wanted to achieve. This male image
offers a spiritual insight more related to illumination than to darkness;
it carries the feminine as well as the masculine. Based on an early collage
painting (1976), titled Cloud Figure Seated, the etched version
carries an even greater visual and emotional grandeur. This is due to the
method of burnishing used in order to accentuate the blue textural nuances
within the head and torso of this imposing mythological diety.

Another side of Grossman's art- the side that
is rarely discussed-is the sculptural reliefs made of mixed-media materials
in the mid-'60s. In the catalogue essay for the artist's three-part retrospective
in 1991, art historian Arlene Raven discusses Grossman's work as "employing
leather interchangeably with metal and woodspirited by quick, graceful
movements among their internal forms."10
This is reminiscent of a statement made
by Marcel Duchamp in describing his Cubo-Futurist style of painting, Nude
Descending A Staircase (1913),11
composed of "mechanical parts and visceral organs." The allusion
to Duchamp is not entirely inappropriate to Grossman's work at the time.
Neither are comparisons to the mixed-media reliefs of Lee Bontecou or the
welded sculpture of David Smith, an artist whom Grossman knew personally.12
Although rarely mentioned, the work of sculptor Robert Mallary should also
be noted in this context.

But what was the context exactly? One might state
it as follows: a hybrid between Neo-Dada, of course, influenced by Duchamp
during the late-'50s and early-'60s, and the mythological figurations of
Smith. The Bontecou reference is the most elusive, however, and in some
ways the most interesting. Bontecou had a certain presence in the New York
art scene of this period and was championed by critic Donald Judd. She
had a certain mysterious aspect to her work not far removed from that of
Grossman. It was a dark, torrential side, a disturbing aspect, yet one
that was always contained and formalized within the context of its self-generating
mystery. It is Bontecou's sculpture, which employed canvas and metal parts,
that connects most accurately with the gestural reliefs on canvas made
by Grossman in 1965. Yet there is also a connection with the more recent
sculptural reliefs, completed by Grossman 30 years later in 1994 and 1995,
such as Black Lavascape (1994-95) and Opus Volcanus (1994).

Both of these reliefs-employing black leather,
rubber, metal parts, wood, and acrylic-are extensions of the 1993 collage-drawings
that were influenced by a trip to Hawaii. What struck Grossman about the
volcanic sites in Hawaii was the sheer physicality and unbridled force
that was beyond rational comprehension. It was the experience of confronting
these sites that moved the artist to try and deal with opposing forces
in her recent work. One can see a direct linkage between one of the later
sculptural reliefs, using these same materials, entitled Ali-Stoker
(1967) and the more recent Black Lavascape (1994-95). The folds
and turns and placements and juxtapositions of the winding, bending shapes
and lines have a certain elastic resonance, a quick pulsation, as though
they were under the command of some extraterrestrial biological time, moving
through space of their own accord. Yet there is a sense of a disturbing
absence of closure seething with opaque mysteries, comparable to filmmaker
Ridley Scott's Alien.13
One never knows for certain whether the beast is dormant or deposed. Looking
at Grossman's Opus Volcanus is like staring into the pit of lava,
the larynx of the earth's encrustation where perception can no longer detect
its limits.

The forces at work (and play) in Grossman's Opus
Volcanus are comparable, on the structural level, to her 1984 drawing
of Five Figures. What is important here is not the surface representation
so much as the strident elements opposing one another in the dark penumbra
between virtual and fictive space. There is a formal tactic in operation
here but there is also the fear and trepidation of the viewing subject
being caught up in this drama of emotion, of being carried away by the
nearly hallucinogenic atmosphere, the hysteria of the earth's crust, spewing
forth its defiance, its hidden, unspeakable detritus, bellowing forth the
industrial (and postindustrial) waste of the last 100 years. What is remarkable
about Grossman's achievement is how the structure of these forms is so
ineluctably consistent that the contrasting elements seem to coalesce and
discover their own consummation.

Like any significant art of this century, Grossman's
work deals with abstract forces that have become formalized as properties
within a given perceivable space, an environment that has been transposed
and possessed with the process of its own making. In Opus Volcanus,
there is the trace of the human hand, yet there is the assertive form of
the triptych. There is also an absence, a deep longing, perhaps, the longing
for hope and a better world amid the chaos and trepidations of the present.
Was it Erich Fromm who once described the human imagination as a volcano
with the potential to both create and destroy?14

Grossman is on the side of creation. She maintains
an indefatigable courage to face the human reality of the present. Her
art is an art that captures the conflict of transition, or being within
the moment of a heightened transition, between the old and the new world,
where the analogs are slowly being replaced by rapid systems of information
transport. And within all of this invisibility, Grossman's figures and
industrial entrails come together as a sign of how we must restore our
sensibility to the tactile experience of being aware in a world that is
changing before our eyes.

Robert C. Morgan is an art critic, artist,
poet, curator, and art historian. He is professor of the history and theory
of art at the Rochester Institute of Technology and adjunct professor of
art at Pratt Institute. His recent books include Between Modernism
and Conceptual Art (McFarland, 1997).

2 I refer
to an exhibition and curatorial essay by Townsend Wolfe, titled "Powerful
Expressions," in which Nancy Grossman was prominently included,
at the National Academy of Design in New York, 1996-97.

3 This and
other quotations in this essay, attributed to Nancy Grossman, were taken
from a telephone interview with the artist, February 18, 1998.

5 Ibid., 38.
When the family moved from New York City to Oneonta in 1945, two of her
mother's sistersfollowed along with their respective families. Nancy grew
up with eight adults and as one of sixteen children. Grossman's father
was a devout Jew, while her mother enforced Roman Catholicism on the children,
thus creating a conflict.

8 There is
an earlier sculptural figure of a male torso, also wrapped in leather,
that is the single exception to the rule. On the other hand, many of the
male figures in the drawings could be interpreted as equivocating between
sexual identities.

9 In "Fragments
of a Journal in Hell," Artaud states: "I hunger less for
food than some kind of elementary consciousness." Artaud, op. cit.,
40.

10 Raven,
op. cit., 98.

11 Interview
from the film, Marcel Duchamp: In His Own Words, edited and produced
by Lewis Jacobs, 1976.

12 Raven,
op. cit., 102.

13 The affinity
between Grossman's heads and science fiction film would be a fascinating
topic to pursue, especially in light of the current academic rage for "visual
culture." In addition to Ridley Scott's Alien (the original
version), I would suggest that the character Darth Vader in the George
Lucas Star Wars trilogy has an affinity with Grossman's work. On
the other hand, Grossman might have to share the source of the Vader image
with the face on Boccioni's Continuity of Forms in Motion (1912),
otherwise known as the "Walking Man," in the collection
of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

14 I recall
this statement by Fromm as cited in a book by New Zealand educator Silvia
Ashton-Warner, Teacher, published in 1965. In the book, she discusses her
rationale in teaching unacculturated Maori children.